The Animals Who Built a Home: Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy
Love Without a Name
By J. H. Irwin
Author | Storyteller | Capturing Life, Memory, and Meaning
In a world that refused to recognize their bond, two men created a private language, endured distance and jealousy, and built a life together that lasted thirty-three years.
When Christopher Isherwood met Don Bachardy on a Southern California beach in 1952, the world had no respectable language for what they might become to one another. Isherwood was forty-eight, an established English novelist whose Berlin stories would later help inspire Cabaret. Bachardy was eighteen, a first-year UCLA student who had not yet discovered the artist he would become.
They were separated by thirty years, two countries, vastly different levels of experience, and a society that regarded love between men as something shameful, dangerous, or criminal. Yet within a year, they were living together in Santa Monica, beginning a partnership that would endure until Isherwood’s death in 1986.
Their story was not remarkable because it was perfect. It was remarkable because it survived the forces outside their home and the storms that sometimes erupted within it.
